Knoll Generation Chair Interview

Marc Levin, Founder & CEO

Hello again,

We’re simply awed by the newest chair from Knoll, the Generation, and want to share the exciting thoughts and ideas behind the development of this amazing chair.

I had the opportunity to talk candidly with Benjamin Pardo, Senior Vice President of Design at Knoll, Inc., to get the real inside scoop. Enjoy!

Pardo introducing Generation Chair to gallery audience

Benjamin: I like the name of the Generation chair and it ascribes to a couple of things: It's the next generation of material for seating, it thinks about how a new generation of people sit and work, how they use the product and it also sets you up for the next Generation of products, in terms of a new family of products based on this chair.

Benjamin: We started to think about Generation at the end of 2005 and the chair shipped July 15th of 2009, so about four years.

Benjamin: Yes, and that's very fast, actually. The research, or the thinking part, basically takes up the first year. Next are the preliminary design choices. The real work to make Generation took 3 years.

Benjamin: I won't comment on aesthetics, because everybody has an opinion associated with that, and that’s one of a whole series of questions that a consumer needs to make a judgment upon, based on their personal taste. But from a "sit" opportunity, the Knoll Generation Chair is being able to sit in a way that’s much more responsive to what their needs are. It introduces:

• how to move through a chair
• the fact that you can "side sit"
• the question of the material selection associated with the back
• the responsiveness of that back in terms of overall comfort

As I perceive it, support for the individual really moves the Generation Chair up to the next level of passive ergonomics, in terms of the benefits that someones' going to get from being able to work with that kind of support. And I think that those benefits distinguish Generation very specifically.

Knoll Generation Chair

I also think that there are some very practical things about Generation, something simply along the lines of - the Generation Chair is relatively soft, not necessarily exoskeletal. When someone is working at a desk, when they turn, they don't want to bang the edge. There's the "sit" aspect of the chair and there are all these practical issues of it, in terms of how the chair interacts with individual objects, surrounding you when you're in an office posture.

Also the other questions for me that are important are: Is it hard to sit in, in terms of touchpoints; there's probably a greater level of informality in the home, than there would be in an office environment, someone might be working in a pair of shorts, or they might have their kid in the room, etc. so the capability of being able interact with an object in turn and do alternative kinds of things that would occur in the home office, I think Generation permits more than any others on the market.

Benjamin: I think that being able to fidget is important while people are either in a conference situation, or typing or having a conversation with someone when they're seated. I think that the idea of being absolutely sedentary and form-seated into a chair or what is prescribed as in an "ideal ergonomic position" associated with a chair - one that holds you in one place - I don't necessarily ascribe to that. I ascribe to a much more passive ideology associated with the anatomy, it comes down to the fact that people should move. You know, every once in a while I should probably stand up.

Notwithstanding, one of the ways in which fidgeting is an important thing to me is based on… we did a lot of video edu-graphic work, watching people in chairs and working and in groups. We found that the doodlers who were gesticulating and the people that shifted their weight and crossed their legs and moved through various postures, that those were the people who were paying the most attention and we found that if we were watching a video of a long meeting, those who stayed still had a tendency to be the ones who were not participating or some were even napping. I think it's very important that there be a level of movement and a chair that can support that movement, when you're either in one of those task postures or a group-based posture that requires you to be wired into the same position.

Knoll Generation Chair in Smoke Grey

Benjamin: I don’t sit still, I get up and walk around. I think the Generation Chair is for someone who is so task oriented that they need to sit for eight hours, and do data entry or someone who is in a customer-service based opportunity or someone who works at home and needs to do some focused work for a long period of time.

It’s as simple as what I’ve always done this with my eyes when I sit looking at the computer for a very long time, then I take my eyes off the screen and look at something far away. It’s the same thing – I’m moving a muscle, whether it’s my iris or my legs and my arms. I think that it’s really the same thing.

Benjamin: I think they're directly related to each other. When I talk about a more passive ergonomy, I'm talking about a chair that responds to you, rather than you have to respond to the chair. The intuitive ergonomy is the fact that you sit in the chair and you understand how the chair supports you and at a certain point, you don’t even have to think about it. There's a nuance there that makes the distinction between one and the other.

Benjamin: I'm not a physician and I'm not going to talk about this from a medical perspective. In the Knoll Generation Chair, there are opportunities for airflow to move through it, so the question is only about heat buildup that comes from sitting for an extended period of time. By giving people the opportunity to move while they're in the chair, this motion will alleviate that problem, and encouraging motion is intrinsic in the way the chair responds to you.

Benjamin: This is always a big argument because the operations people don't want any other color but black and I want a lot of color. I think the real question is between the warm and cool neutrals. My bias in thinking is most specifically considering the overall office environment and I start with that. Then I think about the Knoll palette, so the color red is an obvious one. I spend a lot of time with Dorothy Cosonas, the head designer. She's very good with color.

Benjamin: Choosing colors is also a question of textile, because it's intrinsically a part of what the seating does. I look at the color work of a lot of people. We work through the process, starting with 80 things on a board and narrow it down to 20. Red, being the most difficult color, probably goes through 20 incarnations on average before they get it right. Firecracker red, specifically, is a tough bastard to get.

Knoll Generation Chair in Firecracker Red

Benjamin: We really wanted a chair that wasn't expensive, based on a certain level of high performance task chairs. We really wanted to find a midpoint price associated with the Generation chair. In terms of the range of seating Knoll offers, we wanted a balance between the Chadwick and Life chair, with the Life chair acting more formal in posture, appearing more executive and seemingly more appropriate for a private office. I really needed a chair that would cover up that middle ground.

Benjamin: Formway is the company we worked with in the past that designed the Life Chair. It’s a lot of fun to work with them, they have a great design team. There were two or three designers and a number of engineers on the design team that worked on the Generation Chair - and notwithstanding the back and forth, which is bizarre – we have a very good relationship with them.

Benjamin: I think that we had a very good experience with them, associated with the Life Chair. A) there's our previous relationship with them and B) there aren't a lot of people out there who understand how to design chairs, because they're kinetic objects.

Formway does it quite well and another reason, which was very important to me, was the opportunity to be able partner with them - associated with the early research phases, in terms of the thinking, quite frankly: why the hell do we need another office chair?

It's associated with their design capability, our familiarity, being able to do research work together and put it all together to understand an overall brief and the capability to do the materials study together and work back and forth, that's really the reason why we went with Formway.

That's a long way of saying, no, we didn’t consider anyone else.

Benjamin: I had two very important ones:

Piero Molteni, an engineer, who I worked with for 17 years – owns UNIFOR, an office furniture company, with high-design products. He decides what products are developed and how they are developed.

Second is Jeffrey Osbourne, who actually was head of design at Knoll from the 70’s through 1988; he has become a very close friend.

Those are two guys I look to in terms of mentorship, and I also aspire to the level of excellence they have achieved.